Positive steady state solutions of a plant-pollinator model with diffusion (Q256886)

The paper studies existence, uniqueness and stability of a positive steady state for a plant-pollinator reaction-diffusion system of cooperative type involving a Beddington-DeAngelis nonlinearity and homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions. The authors provide necessary conditions on the parameters of the model for the existence of positive steady states and they establish some a priori bounds, which allow them to give, by means of degree theory, (more restrictive) sufficient conditions for existence. Such a positive steady state is also shown to be unique, stable and a global attractor for the dynamics, provided that a parameter \(\alpha>0\), which takes into account the plants' efficiency in translating plant-pollinator interactions into fitness, is small. Finally, some numerical simulations are presented, which on the one hand confirm the analytical results and on the other one show that the existence of a positive steady state should hold under more general conditions than the ones considered in the paper.